by jay earley phd
Please Note: Each book review is intended to provide an overview of the content and it’s main benefit to the reader. Though I recommend reading a book alongside following The Roadmap, I am in no way connected to the author or publisher or them to me or this website.
key elements
– An excellent practical book showing you how to apply IFS techniques to yourself without the need for a therapist.
– Using IFS we can understand all parts of ourselves, and what motivates us.
– Accepting all of ourselves is essential to healing our minds and living a fulfilling life.
– Read this book in conjunction with the previous book about IFS – No Bad Parts by Richard C. Schwartz. Neither on their own is sufficient.
why this book is worth reading
Jay Earley is an accomplished therapist and writer who was trained in IFS by Richard Schwartz. This book, Self Therapy, in my opinion, is the best practical application of the IFS model. It is easy to follow and helps guide the reader through what can initially feel like a complicated and somewhat alien process.
Where Schwartz’s books can bounce around a bit on the practical aspect of applying IFS, this book is direct and to the point, helping the reader best understand their internal world at the level of all our usual problems in life. Earley helps us access Self to heal our parts calling Self “the agent of psychological healing” but he has less interest in the deeper spiritual implications of Self which we’ve already discussed in the review of No Bad Parts.
The IFS Way
The book begins with a three chapter introduction & two main parts which teach you how to practice IFS yourself. The introductory chapter explains IFS from scratch and shows an example of an IFS session. Part One then covers working with your Protector Parts and accessing Self. Part Two covers working with and healing your Exile Parts. In this way the book really teaches what it says on the cover – Self-Therapy.
Chapter one is a brilliant outline of how IFS sees the mind and how practicing IFS can benefit anyone with any challenging feelings and thoughts. Earley’s description of how IFS sees the mind is worth quoting at length: “The human mind isn’t a unitary thing that sometimes has irrational feelings. It is a complex system of interacting parts, each with a mind of its own. It’s like an internal family—with wounded children, impulsive teenagers, rigid adults, hypercritical parents, caring friends, nurturing relatives, and so on. That’s why this therapy approach is called Internal Family Systems Therapy.”
Allowing this is key to making IFS work for you and at first it can seem plain weird to think of your various feelings as results of Parts, or sub-personalities, however as Earley explains in the same chapter this approach isn’t new and goes back to Carl Jung at least. I would also argue that Freud’s dividing of the mind into Ego, Id and Superego is just a simpler version of viewing your Parts. The Ego is what you think of as your more adult, rational Parts, the Id is your more child-like Parts and the Superego like the Parts that believe you should do this or that in the world to be accepted.
The genius of IFS and where its true power lies is that it takes the pressure away from each of us having to be this one perfect person who gets life right all the time. Though with IFS this perfect aspect of you does exist – Self – it is a leader within and when you think or act in a way that you know is unhealthy – whether overeating or screaming in rage at your kids, or criticising yourself for really nothing, Self is there to heal those Parts of yourself that have jumped up inside and taken over.
In Earley’s example of a client called Sandy in chapter one, Sandy has conflicting Parts within her pushing in opposite directions, “Using IFS, Sandy would learn how to access her true Self, which is a port in the storm, a place of strength and compassion, and the source of internal healing. Her Self would connect with each of Sandy’s three parts in a loving way that allowed them to trust her. Following the IFS procedure, she could help them release their fears and negative beliefs, allowing their natural strengths to flourish.”
If you are thinking this all sounds impossible, rest assured it isn’t and there are many years now of IFS success stories. For myself IFS has been and is key in understanding and healing my own internal world.
True Self-Therapy
As Earley says, “Unlike many forms of therapy, IFS doesn’t pathologize people. When we have problems in life, IFS doesn’t see us as having a disease or deficit. It recognizes that we have the resources within us to solve our problems, though these resources may be blocked because of unconscious reactions to events in the past. IFS is designed to be Self-led. It empowers you to take charge of your own growth because your true Self, not a therapist, is the agent of healing and wholeness. This makes IFS a natural vehicle for self-therapy.”
This is key and why IFS is also a natural vehicle for self discovery and so a great tool within The Roadmap. By using IFS to explore within, you can more easily find the spaciousness (I think of it as an infinite spaciousness) of Self. You are also more easily able to find why you are acting as you are, always though stories various Parts of yourself have learned in life from birth to the present day.
IFS allows you, through Self, to allow all these stories to be told through your Parts’ voices and so is ideal for discovering your values as well. By listening to your Parts you are finding out in life what you want to do, what you like and don’t, what kind of person you are. As seen already, answers to these questions can help bring health and a meaningful (happy) life. And, because IFS pays attention to the body as well, if you have pain, or tension, or even illness, you will connect more immediately to the thoughts and feelings behind these bodily symptoms. I explore this subject in more depth in the article Mind Body Healing.
protector parts & Self
In Part One of the book Earley goes into detail on the steps to get to know your Protector Parts and access Self. These steps are summarised below and are generally done within a quiet place in your home where you won’t be disturbed for a half hour or so. Sitting or lying down with eyes closed is recommended.
1. Focusing on a part – there are a different ways to find a Part to work with but starting with a “trailhead” is for me the easiest. Earley’s definition of a trailhead is excellent – “A trailhead is an experience or a difficulty in your life that will lead to interesting parts if you follow it. It can be a situation or person you react to, an emotional or bodily experience, a pattern of behavior or thinking, a dream, or anything else that indicates parts to explore. We call it a trailhead because it is the beginning of a trail that can lead to healing. It usually involves both a life situation and your response to that situation.”
When you choose a trailhead and think about it, you’ll usually find emotions and thoughts coming up and these are your Parts coming through. Time to listen. Earley recommends a Protector Part to begin with. One of the examples he gives is of Walter, who sees images of several Parts, one of a Striving Part of himself as an accountant – trying to make sure all angles are covered.
2. Accessing a part – Once you have focused on one Part, you can literally talk to it, ask it questions like what does it want to tell you? Ask what emotion does it feel? Where do you feel it in your body? You can see what it looks like in your mind’s eye as well and Parts are often distinct like the example Julie who sees one of her Protector Parts as a tin man from The Wizard of Oz.
3. Unblending from a protector – In chapter six Earley helps us understand how our minds work through the concept of the “seat of consciousness” this is essentially a way to understand that at any given time we are generally acting from the viewpoint of one of our Parts or from Self. The aim is to be more in Self than in Parts and Earley sees Self as the “natural occupant of the seat of consciousness.” However when you get taken over by a Part that is trying to protect you you’ll often experience this in an extreme way as anger say, or fear. To really get to know these Protectors then you learn to “unblend” from them so that Self is back in the seat of consciousness. the easiest way to do this is to ask your Parts if they would be willing to make space for you.
4. Unblending from a Concerned Part – A Concerned Part is a Part that will intervene when you are trying to work with a Protector Part because it is concerned about what might happen. The process of unblending from Concerned Parts involves reassuring them that Self is leading and so nothing bad will happen. In practicing IFS, especially when you are new to it, it is important to often check that you are in Self rather than blended with a Part.
5. Getting to know a Protector – This involves asking the Part questions and listening to it’s answers. It is Self that asks and listens because in Self you are non-judgemental, open and honest. You have curiosity and compassion and love for the Part no matter how much damage the Part may be doing in your life. For example if you have a Part that makes you ill, or gives you pain, you can only connect with it and get to know it and love it by meeting it from Self. Earley covers this step in detail in chapter eight.
6. Developing a trusting relationship with a Protector – This is something that happens over time. it is important to check in with your inner Parts, sometimes daily when you first meet them. Over time they will learn to trust you, to trust that Self is leading and they can relax from their roles and instead enjoy life. This, as Earley talks about at the beginning of chapter nine, is where you can truly learn to love yourself – by learning to love all Parts of yourself. As with so many things in life, this is a process.
exile parts & healing
Part two of Self-therapy is about meeting those Parts of yourself that are in the most pain and which your Protectors try so hard to keep hidden from your conscious awareness. This can be a difficult process with strong emotions rising up from the depths of your experience. It is also the place where the most healing takes place. It is like travelling back to times in your life where you were in need of help and then giving yourself the help you needed.
Again, Earley outlines the process in simple detail, which helps make the process understandable and practical. He divides the process into seven steps which are covered in chapters eleven to sixteen:
1. Getting Permission to Work with an Exile – Protectors exist to protect us from the strong emotions of our Exile Parts and In turn, as Ealrey says, Protectors will use “defenses like sleepiness, intellectualizing, distractions, dissociation, or anger” etc. to keep us away from our Exiles. For this reason the process of getting permission from Protectors to work with an Exile is an imperative and not always easy as Earley shows, going through the myriad potential pitfalls and stumbling blocks.
2. Getting to Know an Exile – Once permission is gained, getting to know an Exile is very much like getting to know a Protector Part with similar rules of blending and unblending and also with an even greater need to meet the Exile from a place of Self. The compassion and acceptance of Self is so important as Exiles are often Parts of ourselves that our upbringing and society has viewed as best left exiled!
3. Witnessing – This is a fascinating part of the process where you remember difficult often traumatic times from your life, most often from childhood. These times may be ones that you have thought of regularly or ones that you haven’t thought of for years. Your Exile Parts will show you these times as this is when they and the Protectors associated with them, were “created” so to speak. In IFS Exiles also carry whatever pain from this time as a “Burden.” From a position of Self, you witness these times so that though they are your own memories, you are seeing them as if from a third perspective and not being drawn into the pain of the situation.
4. Do-Over – This step and the next one are like a little bits of magic. In the Do-Over step you ask the Exile what they want to happen to help them in the traumatic situation. This is a first stage of re-parenting your inner child Exile – you become the parent helper that was needed at the time of the trauma.
As an example let’s say you were bullied as a child and now your Exile shows you a scene where you are being picked on. Perhaps they want you to push away the bullies, or make them cease to exist completely. You, from a position of Self do this. You rescue that Part of yourself, breaking the trauma loop it has been trapped in. You don’t question what the Exile wants, you just do it.
5. Retrieval – In this step, now the Do-Over is complete, you ask the Exile Part where it wants to exist now and let it pick. It can come to live with you in your own home as part of you. Or it can go to live in some other world you can construct for it, or it can become part of your body, in your heart for example. This is the second stage of re-parenting your inner child Exile – you become the ongoing Parent helper this inner child Part needs.
6. Unburdening – In this stage you release your Exile & Protector parts from the burdens they have been carrying. In IFS the burdens are given a physical shape or quality and then either burned or blown away or made evaporate, all in a ritualistic way, described in chapter fifteen. Your Exile Parts are then “free” to be light and loving parts of your whole being. This might all sound a bit mystical and perhaps it is, but it works in a very practical way.
7. Integration – The final stage is for your Protector Parts to also be released from their roles and to choose new roles, where they can be happy, much like the Exile Parts.
Memory & Reality Changing
When first using IFS, l struggled with the idea of the Do-Over. It seemed wrong somehow to be going back into my memories and changing them – doing them over, changing them for the better. That shit happened I told myself and no amount of magical thinking will change that reality. It felt to me like I would be creating false memories and of course the spectre of false memory is a problem for any therapy that seeks to go back to heal childhood wounds.
But the more I thought about it, I came to realise that the actual fact of the traumatic event, that reality only happened once. It was my replaying/reliving of these difficult times, over and over that was the real problem. So as I healed Exiles, going back and rescuing them from the events I wished they had never had to endure, I also created a sort of memory book in my mind. In this book I put a page for each healed event with a picture representing it. The pages in the book were the facts of the situation. But they were dead on the paper now, gone forever without the need to experience them again.
The Reality you change when you heal an Exile, re-parent it and release a Protector is the reality created by and for those Exile and Protectors. The Do-Over is for them, not to change what actually happened, or pretend it didn’t but simply to free the Parts of you stuck in those traumatic loops.
The Challenges of IFS
IFS, like any therapy, is not without its drawbacks and for me there are three main ones.
Firstly, it is easy to become so enamored by the success and usefulness of IFS, as I did, so much so that I became almost addicted to finding trailheads within and healing wounded exiles. This is fine, up to a point, but I realised it could have become a never-ending story. There is always more inside (we truly are infinite minds) and so there are always more Parts to listen to and wounds to heal. You have to learn when to stop or you may start to feel that you really are broken, or made up of many broken Parts.
Use IFS to address your most pressing problems, those Parts of yourself that are truly screaming out to be heard. At the same time, by learning to access Self more frequently and bringing self into your everyday life through being present you will find the need to use IFS diminishes as your Parts trust you to lead them from Self and you then only need address a Part that shouts out as life challenges you, as life always will, you don’t have to go looking for parts to heal.
The second main challenge for me is that IFS can start to feel over-complicated. Self-Therapy is an excellent book for learning to practiCe IFS and there is also an accompanying workbook which is very useful, but you can stop there. How to apply the practical wisdom of IFS is in these books. In my experience, trying to divide Parts up into further categories such as managers, firefighters, and giving Self “capacities” starts to blur your inner world not bring clarity. Again, you can end up on a never ending road of self-therapy like with any therapy.
A truth in therapy, as in life in general is that you can’t know or understand everything & this is all the more true of your inner world. Learn to stop looking for more answers. The Roadmap might be all about understanding the infinite nature of life, but it has seven stages (not an infinite amount) for a reason.
The third and final challenge is one common to any therapy – IFS won’t go exactly according to plan. You have to work with it, get to know the Parts of yourself that need to be heard and allow a few rules to slide and follow a few dead ends. But the rewards of self-discovery are worth the detours.
where i see this book in the roadmap
Though coming after No Bad Parts this is really a slight step backwards to go forwards again as this book is best read when progressing through Stages three and Four of The Roadmap, though being IFS it will always dip its toe into stage Six.
As Stage Three and Four learning it will help with an understanding of who you are and the reasons you do what you do. Though it is in no way essential to know yourself, what I call your World Identity, to break free of it’s limitations and feel Universal Consciousness and Infinite Existence, for most people it will be necessary.
If you don’t know who you are it can be impossible to break out of the cage you have constructed for yourself – you simply don’t know what it is made off, or where the lock is located, never mind about finding the key to the lock.
Self Therapy shows you what the cage is made of and with the IFS process of accessing Self (closely related to Universal Consciousness) you will start to feel you might know where the lock is located and the fact that you are holding the key in your hand the whole time.